I dove into language design a couple of years ago to try and build my own transpiled DSL. At first I tried reading about it, and quickly became overwhelmed. Too

I dove into language design a couple of years ago to try and build my own transpiled DSL. At first I tried reading about it, and quickly became overwhelmed. Took a step back and just started writing code that seemed like it would do what I wanted. I ended up writing a parser that built an AST, even though I didn't know what an AST was at the time. It's a huge boost to your confidence when you get around to reading the literature and it describes exactly the solution you came up with, like "yes I'm on the right track and I'm not as stupid as I thought I was."